I feel this would be a better article if it actually linked to some good tutorials or learning resources for these tools. Otherwise this amounts to giving a baby a chainsaw and expecting a bear sculpture to materialize

Wazzat: Pavilion, a fourth-person puzzling adventure, throws you directly into its mysterious world without any text tutorials or beginning explanations. A puzzle game portrayed through exploration and audio-visual imagery.

Mandatory Disclosure: They sent us keys

Makes with the working

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Shiny / Sounds

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Ever enable “show cursor/touch” on the Androids?

Because that’s what will distract you from the beautifully drawn levels.

It shouldn’t but it’s just so damn out of place with the rest of the aesthetic.

The levels/puzzles are wicked beautiful and hella intricate.

It has sounds but like Mr. Modo I hate the bells so they were noped with a quickness.

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Very pretty hand drawn sprites and backgrounds

The one sore spot is the crappy photoshop-effect-esque cursor you use to ding bells

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For all my spiels about mechanics, narrative and aesthetics it’s good to see a game which can focus on just the aesthetics and still be functional. I’ll expand on that a bit more later.

Pavilion’s focus is very clearly on the aesthetics.

The backdrops, sprites and even the dullard you’re attempting to help navigate the world are very well drawn.

The background music is subtle but very effective in creating a sort of quasi-theological setting with a healthy dose of atmosphere.

It’s a game which focuses on the “Show, don’t tell” school of game design and I love that.

The moment you leave the Main Menu and get in game proper, there’s no more text on screen!

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Control

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Move, RANG, push/pull, RANG.

Controlla or directional keys + space.

You even made this fkr require a controlla on the NVIDIA SHIELD?

Why not let me directly interact /w the world via gerbil?

This is either a troll or being stupid on purpose.

I’m not giving it two Chairs because this artard decision does allow you play this in Big Picture without needing the Areola Controlla.

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DING

You control the guy by ringing bells. I want an option to slap the guy upside the head whenever he does something stupid

Also, to echo my cohosts: Y U NO USE MOUSE FOR CURSOR

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Controls, in other to not break immersion, need to be spot on.

And the way to make spot on controls, in a game where your agency as a player is conveyed by a cursor, is to use the tool people are often the most familiar with. Which in the case of cursors, it’s a freakin’ mouse!

How do you make a game where a player’s only visual representation in-game proper is a cursor and not have mouse control for it?

The closest you can get to “mouse control” in this game is to grab a Steam Controller, set one of the areolas to “Enhanced Camera Control” or “Joystick Mouse”.

That way, that areola will behave like a touchpad but still output as though it’s an analog stick.

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FUN

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If I leave it running in the background I forget about it until don’t and end up solving another puzzle.

Yeah, we’re getting odd to a bad start.

I don’t know, it never really clicked with me.

I found the puzzles more frustrating than challenging.

More importantly the game doesn’t exactly go out of it’s way to explain why you should bother in the first place.

This isn’t a fourth-person puzzling adventure nay, it’s a dick God simulator who just so happens to have a raging stiffy for ringing bells.

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If you caught the stream on Wednesday, you saw a few of the puzzles

Not so much logic as process of elimination

I wanna compare this game to a much better artsy puzzle game: The bridge

The bridge fucks with you. It gives you a couple simple solutions that make you fall into the trap

You need to think several steps ahead

This? The main character is an idiot who can’t see things five feet in front of him, and you expect me to guide him to a door.

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We’ve had puzzle games before which stride the line between simple and simplistic.

Stephen’s Sausage Roll immediately comes to mind.

Not just for its simplicity but also for its almost utopic reliance on mechanics.

SSR eschewed fancy aesthetics and all manner of pre-formed narrative to focus on a very simple set of mechanics.

And the very basic aesthetics served only to complement those mechanics.

Everything you needed to solve any given puzzle was ALWAYS on screen the entire time.

That is how you make a genius puzzle game. You give players the gun and then sit back with some popcorn watching them repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot.

Pavilion is definitely trying to do something similar, but fails to grasp the “simplicity factor”.

Yes, the art is very pretty, but if you’re making me scroll through an entire screens-worth of nothing just to so you could put more pretties in and that ends up artificially inflating the difficulty, because I can’t see exactly which bell is going to lead where, you haven’t made a game.

You’ve made a pretentious piece of masturbatory art. Which explains the whole “fourth person” denominator.

A very aesthetically pleasing one at that!

But you failed to grasp the simple concept that, in 2016, a cursor is driven by a mouse

And in your hubris to show us all your lovely artwork, you’ve artificially padded your game in completely unnecessary ways.

Maybe it’s just me and my unwavering preference for mechanics over aesthetics and narrative in videogames.